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04/13/2010

It's apparently not just same-sex couples that socially conservative figureheads like Jennifer Roback Morse of the NOM-affiliated Ruth Institute want to civilly shun. No, no -- it's also any opposite-gendered couple or heterosexual individual who is engaging in the "kind of crazy biotech things we're doing" in order to conceive:

Now, take out the bottom line, which is that reproduction is not a civil marriage requirement, and therefore cannot be used against anyone in either the court of law or the court of public opinion to oppose one certain kind of group's civil equality. Also overlook the indisputable truth that gays and lesbians do have children that they ably raise. The fact of the matter is that for folks like Ms. Morse, the "culture war" is not against just against same-sex couples or same-sex marriage: It's against anyone whose situational reality does not match the two parent, heterosexual, able to conceive without outside assistance, faith-based, properly gender-roled paradigm that they wish to impose on all of society, even though it doesn't match actuality. They are just gunning for LGBT rights in particular because that's what they know they can get away with at this time. We're the low-hanging fruits in this godly garden.

Even if one shares Ms. Morse's Catholic-steeped goal for the world, the reality is that the model does not match the full span of physical existence. Our public policy is to acknowledge our known realm and to shape rights and benefits and protections around the same, not to let certain religiously-mandated wishes exclude those they deem to have missed the mark. We would actually respect Ms. Morse more if she were out on the front lines, lobbying on the state and federal level for laws that require children as part of marriage, that outlaw divorce, stop fertility methods, and secure a host of other things that she seems to view as righteous protections of the family. But she is not doing that. She is using this myth of "acceptable" family to stop one vulnerable population and one vulnerable population only: LGB couples who pay the same taxes and contribute in the same way as their heterosexual neighbors, yet whose own familial bonds are left out to suffer a whole slew of legal storms in ways dissimilar to their fellow citizens.
At least that's what she and Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Robert George, et. al, are doing for now. Tomorrow, it just might be those who benefit from the "kind of crazy biotech things we're doing" whose lives and families are laid out before the public so that any and everyone can gauge their supposed fitness.